A Long Time Ago, in a Lab Far Away . . .

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: February 28, 2002

Correction Appended

STEVE RUSSELL sat in a darkened movie theater recently watching the army of credits roll by after a computer-animated Hollywood blockbuster.

There was a time, he recalls thinking, when a cutting-edge computer-generated fantasy could be conceived, written, tested and packaged for distribution in a few months, just through the part-time efforts of a small group of friends.

To be precise, that time was 40 years ago this month, with the result played out on a computer screen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two tiny spaceships were locked in mortal combat as they swung around a simulated sun. The duel was called Spacewar.

Designed by a small group of pioneering computer programmers led by Mr. Russell, it was the world's first video game. It was an early hint that a powerful new entertainment medium was on the horizon, one that would ultimately bond Silicon Valley to Hollywood. Perhaps most significantly, Spacewar demonstrated that sheer fun would become a driving force underlying progress in computing technology.

Over the years it played a crucial role in inspiring the creators of companies like Apple and Atari, said Henry Lowood, the curator of Stanford University's collections on the history of science and technology. ''It set off a chain of events that created companies and led to a whole idea of what Silicon Valley would be,'' he said.

It certainly established at least one stereotype of the high-tech age: a few frenzied geeks in their 20's obsessively laboring after-hours in a computer lab on a creation that combined play and programming.

But the premise of Spacewar seemed to reflect the specific preoccupations of that time in the early 1960's. It was completed the same month that John Glenn made the nation's first manned orbital flight. And the cold war was at its most perilous stage: the Berlin Wall had just gone up, and the Cuban missile crisis would soon follow.

Now those 20-something geeks are near or past retirement age. Unlike more recent generations of computing and Internet pioneers, Spacewar's six programmers did not find fortune from their invention. Their achievement has made them legends only within the fraternity of the world's original computer hackers.

''The only money I made from Spacewar was as a consultant for lawsuits in the video game industry in the 1970's,'' said one of the game's creators, Alan Kotok. ''I have all this fame, but it's in a very narrow circle.''

Mr. Kotok and the other members of the original team all remained part of that circle, pursuing careers in computers. Several became hardware designers, several went on to write software, one became a professor and one joined the secretive National Security Agency.

Their early creation is now a museum piece -- literally -- reflecting the software principles and programming culture of its era.

Designed to take advantage of the Digital Equipment Corporation's brand-new PDP-1 minicomputer and the advent of a cathode-ray display screen, Spacewar was written before software was patented, and the original programmers' instructions were shared and freely modified by a small group of software designers.

Introduced some months later at Decus, which was then a Digital Equipment Corporation users' group, Spacewar immediately attracted a cult following. It became so addictive that at the M.I.T. laboratory where it was designed, play was soon banned except during lunchtime and after working hours.

Spacewar was the original ''twitch'' game, requiring lightning reflexes. Each player used keyboard controls or a joystick to maneuver a tiny ship capable of firing a stream of torpedoes as it slid across the screen. Before long a ''hyperspace'' option was added so that a player could make his ship vanish and reappear at a random place on the screen, avoiding certain death.

Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, saw the game played by young hackers at Stanford's computer center in the early 1960's. ''They were absolutely out of their bodies, like they were in another world,'' he recalled. ''Once you experienced this, nothing else would do. This was beyond psychedelics. It impressed the heck out of me.''

In fact, though they came to be known for their hours in front of a computer screen, the game's creators initially met through M.I.T.'s hiking club. The group was led by Mr. Russell, known as Slug, and Martin Graetz, known as Shag, both devoted science fiction fans who wondered why better science fiction movies weren't being made.

Another contributor, Peter Samson, then a 21-year old undergraduate studying engineering at M.I.T., added a crucial component called ''expensive planetarium,'' an accurate scrolling star field that portrayed the night sky over Cambridge.

Spacewar began in January 1962 as a simple object-in-motion program, Mr. Graetz said, and by February had become a rudimentary game, including two ships, a supply of fuel and a store of torpedoes.

Both Mr. Russell and Mr. Kotok said it was never their intent to create a new digital entertainment medium. After the new Digital Equipment computer with its display was installed in late 1961, the group simply began thinking about what might be the best way to demonstrate the power of the new machine and hit on the idea of a graphical simulation of a battle between two spaceships.

Spacewar was an obvious choice, but no one in the group sensed what impact the program would have over a decade and a half of popularity.

''One of the things that drew me to the project was that here you could do interaction and painless education and demonstration, and it was engaging,'' said Mr. Russell, who was 24 at the time.

Correction: March 1, 2002, Friday A caption in Circuits yesterday with an article about the 40th anniversary of the first video game misstated the name of the game. As the article noted, it is Spacewar, not Spacewars.